Four Bits

In Transit

There are times out of mind, times spent alone in a strange place waiting, times when the mind is alive and the body almost ruined, when you hallucinate on the real, and see it in the context of its meaning. These are the airplanes and buses of student fiction. Your thoughts quicken when you notice you’re living. Travel is like the special religious practice of recollection. When you practice recollection you deliberately remember God; when you travel you inadvertently remember yourself. Travel multiplies your opportunities to wake on a bench or a beach, to stand amazed in a new set of lines.

Being alone and in transit: it brings out the pen in our pockets. People who have never written a sentence for its own sake will write a poem, or a novel, or a five-act play, or a letter home. And those people will remember that time with private wonder, and say of their work, “I wrote it in a bus station!” At how many poetry readings does the poet read aloud the poem he confesses he wrote on the plane to the reading?

Other odd times in odd places carry the greater weight of the terrible emotions of real transition. An American is in Bristol, England, when he learns his mother has died; the weird necessity of chance takes him that morning to the Bristol zoo. Over lunch at a restaurant in Quito a Swedish woman admits she is unable to return to her husband and children save to pack to move God knows where. Do you think the woman will forget, for the rest of her life, that restaurant in Quito, whose walls were so thick that the spring light actually took time to pass through the window? Or will the man forget the Bristol zoo, how shiftless the earth seemed then, with all the people passing, and the animals in cages, and no one anywhere at home?

These times are points on which a great many pressures bear down. The mind returns to them; their meaning is never resolved. They are doors banging on their hinges, disturbing the peace. But the feeling of such times, and the fact that life produces them, are not private but universal. This feeling and fact are the very stuff of the novel: Ship of Fools, The Magic Mountain, the key scenes of a hundred modern novels. They are one of literature’s few subjects. There is, after all, time, eternity, and nothing else. And time, like light, is both particle and wave. These times are particles – particles wedged, perhaps, in the trough of a wave. How long, O Lord, will I be in transition, and when will I be home?

The Washington Coast: The Forest and The Shore

The forest and the shore: it is the difference between time and eternity, matter and spirit – two joys, heart’s love and soul’s love, two beauties, one wild home.

In the forest you see the mosses and you greet the trees, remembering them, suddenly recalling the dear and familiar nature of trees, their strength and their companionship; and you think, Land! Here is where I belong, here is where the life of my people takes place, rooted in and furling out; this is what my legs are for, and my lungs. You come to a clearing, a bit of grass in the sun, and your arms fill with energy and you cry, Home!

You heave the trees and haul the brush and eat under a roof. Junk piles up around you, and family. You fall asleep, year by year, in the shade.

You walk on the land, lifting your feet and pushing them forward, uphill and down. There is a gloom to the very variety of the forest, a glut to the mind. You walk on, watching your step. But what if once you look up? Suddenly there is an edge. There are trees with no trees behind them, trees not in the thick of something but at its boundary: who would have thought that there could be an end to trees? You can’t see the trees for themselves any longer; they are a silhouetted lattice and a series of frames for blue. You slow your pace, savoring the transition. You try to love the forest now, where you are, but you cannot: you no longer believe in it. It is no longer a forest but a fringe of the real; it is illusion, and its life a lie. Its soil gives way to sand. Your heart is cracking. The light breaks where the forest halts at the rim of the shore. The sea, the sea, the long clean beach, the holy God almighty sky!

Life Class

I joined the life class this afternoon, drawing from the models, to kill an hour and a half. It was death up there, up on the third floor of the art building; everyone was long past boredom and resigned to a sleepy seriousness. The room is painted blue-gray and piled with dusty bottles and vases of opaque glass; the chairs and easels are every which way. I moved around in the room, although no one else did; then, after a while, another girl moved too. We both had an air of deliberate, unapologetic motion: I hereby proceed quietly to move, here, in this loose world, an action no one will question.

I burst in all hale and smelling like the outside, like the strong wet wind we’ve had for four days – and greeting the people I knew, noisily borrowing paper, and pencil, and eraser, asking questions, and worrying about the models:

Don’t they get a break? They are ten feet away, and can hear every pencil scratch. The dumpy one is making a great point of breathing with her abdominal muscles, an action which makes even her torso look good. Her skin is smooth- looking and very pleasant. The light running up and down her abdomen, in and out of her pubic hair in long spreading waves like surf as she inhales and exhales – this rhythmical strobe of light, with its two extreme shapes and the ones in between, is the first thing you notice when you come in the room. The pose throws her head back, so she is looking behind her. Her eyes are rolled up; her mouth looks dead. I’m sure her lack of expression and her violent breathing are a symptomatic reaction to her neck’s recurved arch. I think she is strangling, and is too polite to say so. The other one, the one with the nipples, looks more comfortable and if possible even more moribund. Hers is a Southern, painted-looking face with dark pointed lips, a smooth nose like a thorn, and well-executed dark eyes.

They both have beautiful limbs, arms round as though they had been turned in lathes, tapering perfectly to round small wrists and little round pointed fingers. Their legs are short but nicely-formed. The nipples alone on the brunette have as much forward thrust as the whole of the breasts on the upside-down one, the redhead. The redhead is enormously pleased with her body and with herself; I’ve seen her around. She has a long oriental robe; the brunette has a yellow satin one; their bodies, during the break, look very pampered in those robes. Both have sweet narrow smooth shoulders, as though their shoulders were the natural and graceful overflow of flesh poured down their necks.

Friends’ Guinea Pig

The Mintons’ guinea pig, Jasper, escaped, and lived for a week in a tangle adjoining their yard. They would see him at dusk on the edge of the lawn, eating grass. He was Nora’s; Nora is six.

Yesterday, Nora found his body. She was genuinely upset and cried when her father, Cronan, confirmed her diagnosis of death. She is, however, a great dramatist, and forces her sobs. Anyway, she was upset.

So Cronan, haunted by the feeling that he was playing a movie scene, comforted the Distraught Child, holding her to his leg and saying grave, hard things about universal mortality. In the meantime, Sean, four, was playing with Jasper, throwing the corpse up in the air and swinging it around by the tail. This is Sean who never once touched the guinea pig while it lived, because, Cronan told me, “It gave him the creeps.”

So Cronan and Nora dug a grave at the edge of the tangle, and Nora was soon laughing, because she spaded up a worm. I saw the tombstone, a good chunk of sandstone on which Cronan had painted in red ink as Nora slowly dictated:

Here lies
JASPER
in the
Ground, who
we loved, that
is a guinea Pig.

AWOL in a Virginia Hospital

I’m in the hospital for some routine work. It’s a week or so after the Pulitzer Prize, and the local papers have made a big fuss. I can’t stay put; last night everyone on every floor of the hospital heard the Public Address system intone, “Annie Dillard, RETURN TO YOUR ROOM.” Now the word has spread to the pink ladies; they’re all coming to my bedside for autographs, on pieces of paper.

This morning I had an EKG from an old black medical technician. Later I went AWOL. I dressed, took the elevator to the lobby, and stuck my arm out the door; it felt good. I stepped outside the door; it felt better. I left. I walked down the street trying to conceal, with a hand deep in my pocket, the plastic patient’s bracelet on my wrist. I jumped up on the brick parking lot wall and walked around it.

Later, riding the elevator back to my floor, I saw the same medical technician who’d given me the EKG this morning. “I just saw you outside,” she said. I kept mum. “Are you an author?” I nodded. She said that, moments ago, the doctor who looked at my EKG chart recognized my name and wanted to come meet me. “I told him, ‘Well, if want to see her, there she is, outside on the wall.’ He looked and said, ‘That’s a boy.'”